During an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board yesterday, John McCain – presumably making an attempt at humor – said with a completely straight face that he aspired to be a dictator, while decrying the Congressional rejection of the bailout bill.

“I just want to make a comment about the obvious issue and that is the failure of Congress to act yesterday. Its just not acceptable,” said McCain. “This is just a not acceptable situation. I’m not saying this is the perfect answer. If I were dictator, which I always aspire to be, I would write it a little bit differently.”

McCain’s senior economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin has also called[3] on the executive branch to ignore Congress and force through the bailout legislation, which was voted down on Monday.

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A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Another senior economic advisor to McCain, Phil Gramm, vice chairman of UBS’s US division and a lobbyist for UBS, successfully pushed for foreign banks to be included [4]in the bailout plan after they were initially excluded.

The fact that McCain said he yearned to be a dictator without so much as cracking a smile makes the comment all the more disturbing especially in comparison to similar sentiments expressed at least three times by George W. Bush.

Bush infamously said[5], “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator,” during a December 2000 speech.

He also remarked, “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it,” in a July 2001 Business Week interview[6].

When Bush was Governor of Texas in 1998 he stated[7], “You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.”